Animal
Planet
revised edition with a new afterword by the author
SCOTT BRADFIELD
London: Red Rabbit Books, 2016
Copyright © 1995
This revised edition and afterword copyright © 2016
Jacket design by Scott and Jack Bradfield
DEDICATION
To the animals that remain.
CONTENTS
1
Animals Behind Bars!
2
Polar Latitude
3
Ends of the Earth
4
Culture-at-Large
5
New York Story
6
The World of Work
7
Adapt, Adopt, Improve
8
The Revenge of Nature
9
The End
10
And After
EPIGRAPH:
I think I could turn and live with animals
they are so placid and self contained…
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied…
–Walt Whitman
Part One
ANIMALS BEHIND BARS!
1. THE WINTER HOLIDAY
STRANGELY ENOUGH, IT’S in a zoo that animals forget their own community. The closer they’re shoved together, the further their minds retreat from themselves. Divided by barred walls that don’t hide them, they become afraid of looking into one another’s eyes, or listening to one another’s words. They ignore the human crowds that visit them, and avoid their own reflections in the glistening water troughs and aluminum food trays. As they grow old together in the same divided spaces, they begin looking forward to only two things–rain and sleep. Because both bring places to hide. Places animals can hide from themselves.
London Zoo was no exception, and eventually, sometime during his middle years, Charlie the Crow went there to rest for a while. Charlie had been flying all his life, seeing many things, and exploring many options. He had been to Asia, Africa, Alaska, and the North Pole. He had seen overcrowded cities, polluted oceans, animal killing fields, corrupted body politics, and an entire solar system’s worth of bad faith and fiscal inequality. These days, Charlie just wanted to settle down somewhere. He wanted a place where he could cease moving, but never cease talking. Because Charlie loved to talk. It was one of his life’s few pleasures.
“You guys are a trip, man. You really are.” Charlie would perch upon a large, smog-stained oak tree in the middle of the compound, and look everybody over with an incurable smugness. “You got your four walls, don’t you, Buds? You got your pumped-in muzak, fresh meat and greens, weekly hose downs, and even, when you’re good, they might throw you a bone or two. You been cared for so long, you guys think it’s your natural condition. It’s not that you’ve grown fat and lazy. It’s that you don’t have any imagination left anymore. The imagination nature granted you in the first place, like the color of your hair or the flex of your limbs. I’m talking about the ability to dream better lives for yourselves than this, you know, this goddamn zoo. So what do you guys have to say for yourselves, huh? Are you listening to a single goddamn word I’m trying to tell you or what?”
All across London Zoo, animals heard the words Charlie told them, but couldn’t believe those words were meant for them. Turtles, macaws, penguins, and rhinoceri. Swinging baboons, lanky jungle cats, bottled amphibians and slow cephalopods. Words were used to make animals do things, not think about them. Go here. Do that. Eat this. Stop that. So far as zoo’s official residents were concerned, Charlie was perched high above their heads in a way that was not merely physical.
After all, Charlie was a bird.
Charlie could fly.
WINTER CAME EARLY that year, and the animals began hearing a lot of R words they couldn’t pronounce. Words like recession, redundancy, and rationalization. They heard rumors of leveraged buyouts, corporate takeovers, asset stripping, privatization, the ECU, Princess Di’s mood swings, and the planet-wide biodiversity crisis. The zoo personnel began to look more pale and unraveled than usual. They didn’t sweep the grounds as often, or disinfect the living quarters as thoroughly. Using temperature as an excuse, many animals retreated into plasterboard caverns, setting their hibernal clocks for quarter-to-spring. Others fattened their jackets with rich nuts and refined white breads, feeling their blood slow and their ruminations thicken. The crowds of human visitors ebbed. The voices of their human children grew increasingly irritable and plaintive.
“Why don’t they do anything, Mum? Why do they just sit there? And where are the giraffes hiding? Where are all the elephants?”
The giant pandas caught cold and went to hospital.
The shedding snakes hid underneath rocks and logs in slow, greedy ceremonies of digestion.
The solitary okapi, one of the shyest animals in the entire zoo, wept uncontrollably at the slightest provocation.
Wanda the Gorilla sat in her cage all day being steadfastly disregarded by her massive, emotionally unsupportive mate, Roy. “All I ever do anymore is eat,” Wanda complained, tearing apart celery stalks and devouring them into fibrous bits. “I just sit here all day getting fatter and fatter, dropping baby after baby. So tell me–is this any sort of life for a lady?”
The tiger paced in his cage, back and forth, back and forth, while children outside the plate-glass barrier raced him from one end to another. “Just one,” he prayed to himself, “and I swear I’ll never ask for anything else ever again. Just a little one without too much hair. That’s all I’ll ever need to be happy.”
Only Scaramangus the Wildebeest managed to endure every emotional vicissitude, even those engendered by bad weather.
Standing proudly among the females he was born to service and protect, Scaramangus basked in the steam and heat of his own magnificent presence. King of the Beasts. Idol of Men.
“I am chosen, ” Scaramangus exclaimed proudly every morning when the sparse crowds came. “I am incomparable. I am blessed. From out of all the countless Wildebeests in the entire jungle, human beings have chosen me to represent my species to the world.”
The animals lived their collective lives the only way they knew how. By going along with the rhythm of their secret selves. And by totally ignoring one another.
ALL DAY LONG Charlie the Crow sat on the high wires and looked down at them.
There but for the grace of God, Charlie thought.
It was as if the entire Animal Planet was slumbering and nobody on it was ever going to wake up.
2. RADIO ALARM
THEN, ONE NIGHT in bleak November, a radical-extremist guerrilla faction of Animal Action! blew the front gate off the zoo with Semtex and dynamite caps. They were wearing black wool ski masks, black jeans, black turtleneck T-shirts, and black leather gloves, like a team of down-market ninjas. Within moments they had disconnected the zoo‘s various overhead video monitors, burglar alarms, and outside telephones. A series of smaller explosions sounded; cages came unsprung, pop pop pop. Then, as casually as if he was flagging a cab, the leader of the guerrilla band raised a triumphant list to the moon blond sky.
“We all breathe the air!” he cried. “We all love the earth! Endangered species of the world–unite!”
The black-clad guerrillas leapt back over the turnstiles and disappeared into Regents Park, bobbing and weaving across the green fields as if pursued by enemy sniper fire.
The entire zoo was suddenly dark again, silent, preemptive, dense.
And everybody sat up dazedly in their ruptured enclosures, waiting for something that had already happened.
“Mama mia! ” chirped Charlie the Crow, perched atop one of the recently embattled ticket kiosks. “Holy bloody cow.”
Charlie could hardly contain himself. He performed a little salsa on the kiosk’s slate roof.
Something was happening, he thought.
And for once it was something he hadn’t even begun to anticipate.
CHARLIE DOVE INTO the shining air. A fine mist sprayed his face; the cool conflux of moonlight hummed. Across the zoo’s triangular, compartmentalized map, the animals were slowly awakening to one another.
“Caw caw,” Charlie told them. “Caw caw raw caw.”
The wolves sniffed at their broken, wrought-iron gate. Retreated, conferred, sniffed again. The prospect of freedom made them wary. A little uncertain about who they wanted to be.
For some, however, doubt never entered their minds. Wanda the Gorilla took one look at her husband, Roy, and she knew. Already asleep again, he was picking his nose and snoring. Wanda tossed a half-eaten apple over one shoulder and swung through the open door.
Anywhere, she thought. Except where l already am.
Charlie turned and turned again. Movements, smells, new awarenesses, old routines being casually forgotten. In their hay-strewn domiciles, even the slumbering elephants were beginning to rouse. I am not asleep, the elephants thought. The world is changing and I am not asleep.
To his amazement, Charlie saw a community of animals beginning to take shape. Ruminants, primates, rodents, carnivores, and marsupials. Wild ground squirrels and golden lion tamarinds, meerkats and mongooses, fennec foxes and old spotted pigs. The animals were journeying into the strange, neutral spaces between their cages. They were seeing their freedom reflected in the eyes of everybody else.
We are all different, they realized.
And yet all somehow the same.
THE ANIMALS ASSEMBLED in the amphitheater, where chimps had activated the sound system, and by the time Charlie arrived the amplifiers were wailing with feedback. In response, the animals joined their discordant voices into one terrific jungle clamor.
With a swoop and a flourish, Charlie snapped up the mike from Wanda, who was fruitlessly trying to incite the crowd with tales of her husband Roy’s ruthless banana consumption.
“You know what you guys sound like?” Charlie shouted. “You sound like a bunch of animals!”
Charlie’s strangely familiar voice sent a hush over the crowd.
For the first time in their lives, the animals realized what hadn’t been conceivable before. Someone was speaking to them.
And they were supposed to listen.
“You guys want to say something? Then say it in words, man, not grunts and roars. Be goddamn articulate, will you, because you’ve got a choice in this world, whether you like it or not. You either make sense of your lives, or somebody else makes sense of them for you. And where does that leave you, my fellow beasties? I’ll tell you where that leaves you. Right back where you came from. Sitting in cages, man. Pissing on your own doorsteps.”
The animals heard a strange, collective voice begin to emerge from their throats. One long, gathering note of disquiet, anguish, and terrible remorse.
“Now, for the first time in your far-too-miserable lives, you’ve got a chance to speak for yourselves,” Charlie told them. “You can form your own government, make your own laws, relearn your own culture. Haven’t you guys seen Spartacus? Haven’t you guys seen The Battle for Algiers?”
“Spih, spih, spih,” hissed the sibilant snakes.
“Al-geesh,” sneezed the white pelicans. “Al-geesh, geesh!”
Charlie shrugged off the momentary lapse of momentum.
“Okay, maybe not. But you don’t need to watch telly to know you’re being robbed of your freedom! Stay in your little cage, they tell you. That way you won’t be exterminated! What sort of reasoning is that? I’ll tell you what sort of reasoning it is. It’s malevolent, genocidal, terra-phobic, right-brain-thinking human aggression–that’s what it is! And have we had enough? I’m asking you guys? Have we had enough?”
It wasn’t even a word at first. Just a low swerve of vowels. Affirmative. Regular. Long.
“I can’t hear you!” Charlie cried. “What are you–dumb animals or wild beasts of the jungle? Let me hear it, guys! Who’s had enough? Who’s sick of being lied to? Who’s ready to take control of their lives?”
And then it was a word. Intact. Hard. Anchored to the special reality of their intimate animal selves.
“Us!” the animals roared. “Us, us, us, us, us!”
3. THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE
(US. US.)
Scaramangus the Wildebeest was the last animal to awaken, starting to his feet with a gasp and blinking at the distant blue lights of the auditorium.
Not us, Scaramangus thought to himself. Not us, but them.
By the time Scaramangus reached the front entrance, the animals were piling picnic tables and broken lumber against the gates, feverishly turning their idea of the zoo inside out. Someone had started a small bonfire in one of the litter bins. Someone else had overturned the refrigerated cabinets in the Raffles Bar and Restaurant, where animals were riotously sucking on frozen hotdogs and fistfuls of gluey pizza dough.
Scaramangus, meanwhile, stood proudly among them, refusing to get involved. These, he thought, were noisy animals. These were animals without any sense of decorum. Worst of all, these were animals who only pretended not to notice him. Then, the moment Scaramangus let his guard down, bam! Meat for somebody else’s stew.
Slowly Scaramangus grew aware of a pair of steady eyes trained upon his haunches.
“Hey there, Mister,” the voice behind him said.
This was not the Great Society, Scaramangus knew. This was just the same old jungle, where only the strong survived.
He turned, pawed the ground, and breathed his contempt into the chill air. This was the challenge. The supreme test was now.
Wanda the Gorilla had adorned herself in a torn floppy sun hat, terry-cloth leg warmers, and a large green plastic rain poncho liberated from one of the trash bins. The poncho was swung low to reveal a glimpse of hairy cleavage.
“I say, darling. Have we met?” Wanda batted her eyelashes and offered him the last bits of a Kit Kat from her chocolatey fingers. “Are you an antelope or something? I dig those horns.”
Scaramangus took another, deeper breath.
“I,” Scaramangus reminded her, “am a wildebeest. The proudest, and mightiest, and most handsome on the face of the Animal Planet.”
Wanda’s eyes widened.
“Oh, really?” Wanda replied. “So tell me this, then. Where have you been all my life, huh?”
DAWN DIDN’T APPROACH. It gradually pervaded.
First the helicopters arrived; then a siege of police vans, bomb disposal squads, and BBC news minicams. “Please, we know you’re upset,” Superintendent Heathcliff declared over his new lightweight megaphone. “Who wouldn’t be? But why can’t we talk this thing over face to face? Were only here to help.”
The Superintendent was wearing a crisp, white short-sleeve shirt and pleated, navy blue cotton slacks.
“Lousy bastards,” Charlie sighed. “I knew they’d try a little false compassion first, just to loosen us up. Those lying heathen will stoop to just about anything!”
“Look, we realize you big animals can take care of yourselves,” Superintendent Heathcliff continued. “But think about the little ones–the tarsiers, say, or even the cute little penguins. They’re pretty far down the old food chain, wouldn’t you say? Another night’s sleep among the rest of you meat eaters and, well. Let’s face it. An unregulated zoo can get pretty messy.”
Charlie could feel the mood of the assembled animals start to turn. Jungle cats were glancing over their shoulders at lone pigs and yearlings. The cliquish wolves conferred in whispers, observing a twitching orange huddle of dormice.
“When we need human intervention to settle our quarrels, we’ll ask for it!” Charlie cried back.
“Give us a chance,” the Superintendent said. “We want to improve your standard of living, but at the same time we’ve got to be fiscally responsible. We’re working on a lot of new ideas right now, but we’ll need your help to implement them.”
“For example,” Charlie said.
“Well, market forces. We open up the zoo to what they call Free Enterprise Zones. We farm you out to extracurricular jobs–serving tea for the handicapped, fetching groceries and newspapers, or a little rudimentary shop and construction work. We give you all an individual opportunity to improve your lives through hard work and competitive negotiation. And just between you and me, Mr. Crow, what sort of animals do you think might benefit from such a scheme’ Well, those with opposable thumbs are going to clean up, of course. But a bright bird such as yourself, who’s mastered the fundamentals of human speech and grammar–let’s just say that such a hypothetical bird won’t do too badly, either. If you know what l mean?”
“Yeah, right.” Charlie was pacing irritably back and forth on a strand of rusty barbed wire. “You mean you’ll put us on over-crowded tubes and trains every day, other people sneezing on us, no air-conditioning. You’ll tax the bones out of us and instead of investing it in animal services, you’ll spend it to subsidize the chemical and weapons industries. Look, buster, do you really think we’ll fall for this bogus ‘market forces’ folderol? We may be animals–but that doesn’t mean we’re stupid!”
The animals, startled by their own abrupt consensus, roared.
The trees shook.
The sky expanded with oxygen and light.
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” concluded the handsome Superintendent. “Because there are others in my department who aren’t so sympathetic to public insurrection. If you want to talk this thing over at any time, just ask for me, Superintendent Heathcliff. And let me wish you all the best of luck. You’re going to need it.”
4. FREE LABOR. FREE SOIL.
FROM THAT POINT on, it was only a matter of time. The animals had already gorged themselves on all the best junk food and candy bars. They had already sprayed graffiti across the walls of the Caretaker’s office and public restrooms. FREEDOM OR DEATH! ANIMAL RIGHTS NOW! FREE THE SERENGHETI SEVEN! EAT THE RICH BEFORE THEY EAT YOU! The animals knew they had done all they could. They had uttered the truth as articulately as their crude tongues allowed.
“If every animal could journey into space on an orbital satellite, they would experience the same revelation.” Charlie was sucking warm Tetley’s out of a pint-sized aluminum can, feeling lethargic and sentimental. “They would look into the same darkness. They would see the same reflected light of the sun, illuminating the Animal Planet in all its glory. A bit of blue-green mold, pear shaped, slowly spinning. The fragile, momentary testimony of it. Forests broken and slashed. Cities stupefied by their own poisonous emissions. The blue waters turning gray and disconsolate in patches. Each animal would feel him- or herself diminish into this expanding awareness of our entire planet. Not a sense of responsibility, really. Just a sense of location. A grounding in space and time. Each animal would come plummeting back to earth with a feeling of incorporation. Knowing that we’re all part of the same enterprise, and that it’s not owned by AMEX or Dow Jones. A tiny planet packed with countless blundering and unsatisfiable animals, trying to help each other out the best we can. This, friends, is my dream. When I fly, this is the dream that sustains me.”
THEY CAME IN the late afternoon, a time reserved for the animals’ second feeding. The wet plop of teargas canisters drew arcs of smoke across the blue sky, and snipers fired hypodarts from elevated cranes and rooftops.
The largest animals fell first, feeling the barbiturates bite into their flanks and haunches. Panicked, the remaining animals stampeded wildly, blinded by the gas, knocking over fences and water fountains, trampling one another into the boiling gray dust.
FOR SCARAMANGUS, THE line between himself and other animals vanished, threatening to take him with it. The chaos of bodies, the random brutality and anguish, the feverish clash of animals and men. A truncheon glanced off Scaramangus’s forehead and he staggered, turned.
Scaramangus cried out, “Stop! You don’t know who I am!”
Then the Riot Officer lifted his truncheon again. Wearing a hideous off-green gas mask, he resembled a cross between an aardvark and an elephant.
“You don’t even know my name, or whose side I’m on,” Scaramangus cried. “I might as well be an ocelot, or a rat, or a parakeet so far as you’re concerned.” Scaramangus couldn’t believe these were his words on his lips.
A big fat alligator, Scaramangus thought, watching the truncheon descend. A cheetah, a reindeer, a centipede, or a finch.
The truncheon continued to descend. Time, Scaramangus thought. Terrible time.
The sky wasn’t blue anymore.
The truncheon came down.
FOR THE NEXT week to ten days, the animals were kept tranquilized in their cages and enclosures. They weren’t allowed to frequent the exercise yards or the children’s petting zoo. They were fed more cereal and less meat. Every day the wind blew scraps of morning newspaper into their cages, and the animals perused them for articles about their brief fling with greatness. But the newspapers mentioned only shifting interest rates, Third World death squads, American tobacco exports to Thailand. There was hardly any animal news in them whatsoever.
Superintendent Heathcliff was now acting as interim Head Caretaker, assigned to oversee the zoo’s imminent foreclosure.
“Well,” the new Head Caretaker announced one day, his voice, as always, eminently reasonable and firm. “I tried to warn you, didn’t I? I told you we were facing some pretty severe economic shortfalls around this place–you can’t expect the public to continue paying your bills forever, can you? What it comes down to is this–I’m afraid we’ll be closing the zoo in September, so most of you guys will have to be relocated right away. The change of climate can only do you all a world of good.”
Charlie had taken up roost on Scaramangus’s gate, but Scaramangus, having received unusually large dosages of quaaludes over the past few days, didn’t seem to notice.
“Trick is,” Charlie continued, “you can’t cage an entire nation. You can only cage individual animals, one or two at a time. Ergo, a competitive economy. Animal versus animal, male versus female, the have-somes versus the have-nones. Don’t let them fool you with their bullshit about economic retrenchment, Scary. What’s being retrenched is us. Because we’re bigger together than we are apart–and don’t you forget it.”
Scaramangus was dimly aware of Charlie chattering away on the wire fence. But everything seemed smaller, frailer, and more fragile than before the revolution.
“Maybe the Japs are right,” Charlie jabbered, pacing back and forth on the wire. “Maybe we are witnessing an era that has given up on the idea of history. The sense that we are shaping a collective future, and owe debts and responsibilities not only to the corporations who pay our salaries but to the planetary forces that loan us this flesh in which we’re wrapped. I think it’s a very difficult time to be living, Scary. No matter what they tell us in the newspapers, it’s a pretty difficult time, indeed.”
Scaramangus lifted himself unsteadily to his feet and shivered the dust from his jacket. He shook his face, trying to pump blood into his brain and loosen his lips.
Out in the zoo’s central arena, the Head Caretaker was speaking over the microphone to an assembly of local businessmen and community leaders who had come to make bids on the soon-to-be disenfranchised animals.
“And as for the first order of the day,” the Head Caretaker announced cheerfully, “we have a very, very special young lady we’d like you all to meet. Bring her out, boys, so the gentlemen can see.”
Wanda, stripped down to one forlorn, bruised banana, was resting her forehead against the bars of her portable cage and wheezing softly.
“We’re talking about a prime bit of animal real estate here, friends,” the Head Caretaker told them. “Almost as smart as a human being’ that’s our hairy animal cousin, the mighty black gorilla. Stronger, friendlier, and better coordinated than any child. They make great exhibits–in the mezzanine of your office building, say. Or at that stockholders’ meeting you’re planning for the Bahamas next Spring. Let’s start this off right. Do I hear one thousand pounds?”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe,” Charlie moaned, over and over again, trying to drown out the Caretaker’s magnified voice in his ears.
Suddenly, all the anger Scaramangus had ever felt in his entire life lifted up out of his body and deposited itself on the gate where Charlie was sitting.
“I hear fifteen hundred,” the Caretaker declared. “Do I hear seventeen-five?”
Across the zoo, defeated animals felt the weather start to turn. They sat up in their cages and tried to see into the central arena, where the auction platform was surrounded by armed guards.
It was only a word, but Scaramangus knew it. With a sudden roar and a lunge, Scaramangus threw his entire body against the gate and the impact flung Charlie high into the air, wheeling, the earth literally knocked out from under him. Scaramangus reared against the gate with his horns.
It was the word.
The word versus the gate and something had to give.
“Us!” Scaramangus shouted, straining against the bars with his back, his shoulders, his haunches, his brain. “Us! Us! Us! Us!”
He backed up. He saw the gate. He saw the world beyond the gate. He saw the overweight men with bad complexions standing in the arena, brushing off their three-piece suits, turning their pale faces toward the word Scaramangus was trying to tell them.
“Us!” Scaramangus cried. And charged the gate again.
Across the zoo the word was lifting them in their cages. It was time. They would say it now.
The animals began to roar.
Share this post